Gadzooks! This morning I had a dream that I was one of the kids trapped in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, and we were all running and hiding from Tiamat.
Pluck That Violin!
I have a real post coming up, but no time for it right now. Scanning in all these photos takes time. If you really want something to look at, here’s something incredibly freaky (Worksafe – but don’t look at this while you’re eating):
No, it’s not a big white tree – look closer.
AKA Where have all the birds gone? AKA The next Hollywood horror flick AKA be careful where you park your bike.
Of Interest to Practically No One.
If you ever rent a car from Avis, use the hell out of the air conditioning – because they’ll be charging a $1.24 air conditioning surcharge so you might as well get your money’s worth. They didn’t have a windshield wiper fluid surcharge but I used it willy-nilly, out of spite (and contrary to my conservationist tendencies).
So my mom promised an all-expense paid trip to Penticton for my brother and I to make the annual family get-together, of which I have missed the past…countless. All I had to do was rent a car and drive up there. It’s a novel thing to have a mobile trunk. Vast possibilities jumped out at me – I got a large dry erase board for Slackademics at Staples in Chilliwack because I could.
I’ll tell you all the dreadfully boring details soon enough, but I wanted to focus on a couple of photographs that I scrounged out of my mom’s photo albums. Check out my old room in Chilliwack. Can you guess what year it is by the poster on the wall? Stewie? That stuff to the left of me is almost definitely charts or something for Traps & Treasures or Mazes & Monsters or whatever home grown ripoff of D&D I was working on. We didn’t have money for the real thing.
I think there was plastic over the windows so I wouldn’t pee out of them. No, actually I think it was probably our budget insulation. Any burgeoning fondness for outdoor activity was squelched at an early age by covering all portals to the outside world with a semi-opaque surface.
One last thing about this pic – you see those green and white dresser drawers to the right of me, with the stickers on them? My mom got those for me at an auction or something, and they had three stickers on them. The Snap (or Crackle, or Pop) in the middle, the McGregor round tartan sticker on the edge there, and another one. You can see the others I started to add – some Return of the Jedi stickers there. Below is what these drawers look like today:
You can still see McGregor in the lower left and Crackle, plus a host of pop culture icons and various weirdness. The sides, top and even the insides of the drawers are also plastered with stickers. Here’s the other one:
See what you can pick out.
Finally, here’s me looking my best at 13:
Doesn’t get much better than that!
It Came to Me In A Dream
This morning I dreamt of orchestrating the fireworks to Mark Mothersbaugh’s Ping Island Lightning Strike Rescue, and it’s the best idea my subconscious has ever had.
Listen: http://www.thickets.net/toren/ping.m4a (4 megs)
As for my consciousness and the rest of me, we’re off to Penticton for the weekend. Until Monday, I will leave you with this message I got on OKCupid:
Hi ! I am called Elena, me with 26 years. I have seen your structure,
and it loved me, therefore I have decided to write to you the letter.
I would be pleased, if you have written to me the answer to my letter,
and we might study each other better. I should request you, please
write to me the letter on mine email : elenochka000@yandex.ru . I
shall be pleased to see your letter, and I shall answer all your
questions. I shall tell at once, I shall try to lead with you a lot of
time and you with me do not become bored. Bye my new friend
Elena !!!!!!!!
I Do Enjoy the Al Franken
I’ve been listening to Al Franken’s audio book (also available in print of course) Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Here’s an excerpt just for you:
I want to draw you a word picture of a lagoon you may remember from Gilligan’s Island, where a caged lion or an Indian in a canoe might wash up just to get that week’s episode rolling. This lagoon is a rectangle the size of three football fields, lined with 40-mil high-density polyethylene and filled, to a depth of thirty feet, with pig shit.
Now imagine that, at the bottom of the lagoon, pebbles have punctured the liner, allowing the liquefied pig shit to seep under and ferment. A bubble is growing. The polyethylene liner rises like a creature from the brown lagoon. It breaks the surface, spilling a pungent stew of untreated feces and urine into a nearby creek. An undocumented Guatemalan worker is ordered to puncture the liner with a shotgun blast. Retching, he fires. The swollen liner retreats into the fetid depths. Mission accomplished.
The next day, however, one of the most magnificent sights in all of nature, a shit geyser, explodes into the afternoon sky. Those working nearby watch the pillar rise ten, then twenty, then thirty feet above the lagoon. It is as though the Earth itself is afflicted with a virulent case of projectile diarrhea.
Hold that image in your mind.
George W. Bush is the worst environmental president in our nation’s history. As you read this, his self-interested coterie of industry shills are dismantling the protections that you and I take for granted.
Our air, water, and wildlife are under attack. How could this have happened under the watch of a man who spoke so passionately and with such quiet eloquence to this very issue in his very first presidential Earth Day speech?
“Each of us understands that our prosperity as a nation will mean little if our legacy to future generations is a world of polluted air, toxic waste, and vanished forests. … I encourage Americans to join me in renewing our commitment to protecting the environment and leaving our children and grandchildren with a legacy of clean water, clean air, and natural beauty.”
I know I joined him in renewing my commitment. Not too many people realize how much celebrities can do to improve the environment. Remember how I’m a nut for statistics? Well, not too many people realize this, but show biz celebrities make up just .000000001 percent of the world’s population, and yet consume nearly 37 percent of its resources. For example, every day, seventeen acres of rain forest are consumed by Barbara Streisand alone.
Finish reading this chapter (and more on the lagoon) at http://skeptically.org/env/id13.html
And for good measure – Al Franken vs Stephen Colbert
The Toren That Fell To Earth
I used the Computing Effects of an Impact on Earth website to learn what would happen if I, Toren Atkinson, fell to Earth – or the closest I could come to such.
My Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 1.00 km = 0.62 miles (Is this where I fall from or where you are watching from? The former, I think)
Projectile Diameter: 1.00 m = 3.28 ft = 0.00 miles (I’m two meters tall but obviously I don’t have a diameter of even 1m. So I’m cheating a bit, but that’s the minimum value I could enter. Just imagine me curled up in a phoetal position and fattened up on Thanksgiving dinner when I fall. I do love being called a projectile.
Projectile Density: 500 kg/m3 (This is about half the density of ice. I guessed. I don’t really know what my density is.)
Impact Velocity: 15.00 km/s = 9.31 miles/s (11 is minimum, So I figure 15 is decent.) Impact Angle: 90 degrees (straight on – the best way.)
Target Density: 1000 kg/m3 Target Type: Liquid Water of depth 1.00 meters, over typical rock. (I imagine myself falling into Chris Woods’ kiddie pool.)
Energy:Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.95 x 1010 Joules = 0.70 x 10-5 MegaTons TNT. The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is less than 1 month. (Think about that!)]
Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 89300 meters = 293000 ft (“I regret nothing!” you hear me cry). The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 72700 meters = 239000 ft (I’m so beautiful!). The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 14.3 km/s = 8.86 miles/s
The energy of the airburst is 2.78 x 109 Joules = 0.66 x 10-6 MegaTons. No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface. (Watch out for hot flying junk)
Major Global Changes:The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass. (Negligible mass? How dare they!) The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth’s rotation period or the tilt of its axis. The impact does not shift the Earth’s orbit noticeably. (Not literally, but metaphorically, watch out.)
Air Blast:The air blast at this location would not be noticed. (The overpressure is less than 1 Pa) (I.E. no Toren shock wave).
And if I was 500 miles across, I might look like this (7 minute video which according to astronomer Phil Plaitt is pretty accurate). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYgEwXWilUc
Shawn & Me
I just received a phonecall from Shawn at Shaw. Maybe Sean at Shaw, I don’t know. Anyway there were a lot of Sha- sounds. I was at home (as I always am when I take calls) and it was 5ish and I couldn’t fathom who might be calling, but I picked up just in case it was George W Bush calling to apologize (I wouldn’t accept). The conversation went like this:
Me: Hello
A moment of silence. This is a dead giveaway for a telemarketer and normally if someone doesn’t say hello straightaway I’ll just hang up the phone while I imagine the other person is rushing to push the button that will connect them to me. But, in a split second, I thought to myself I will hang up, just as soon as I hear the other voice. They’ll think I couldn’t hear them because the earpiece was already on its way to the phone carriage. The fact that in this day and age probably only 10% of the western world still have phones with carriages didn’t factor in to my scheme.
Young, hip sounding guy: Hi this is Shon from Shaw. Is this Toren?
The guy sounded like a decent guy so I didn’t hang up. I thought I’d give him a chance and see where this went.
Me: It sure is.
Sh’awn: How are you doing today?
Me: Pretty good (this was a lie but it’s one of those lies I don’t feel bad about because Seawn is not really interested in how I am doing and telling him the truth would just make him uncomfortable.)
Shjonne: You use Shaw for your internet and cable needs, is that right?
Me: Yes, that’s right.
Shean: Have you heard about our new phone promotion?
Me: Uh… (trying to recall my last telemarketer experience and faltering on the details) I don’t think that I have.
Shawwn: Do you spend more than $50 on long distance a month?
Me: Oh god no.
Shyawn: Your entire phone package is less than $50?
Me: Yes. It’s in the low forties. Around $42 I think.
Sheaghn: So you don’t make any overseas calls?
Me: Never.
SHAWN!: Okay, well thank you for your time, you have an awesome day.
Me: You too.
And that was the best telemarketing experience I ever had, except for the ones where I pretended I was someone else, and the one where I was talking to the lady for several minutes and before she could clinch the deal she asked if I was over 18 and I told her quite truthfully that I was not and she didn’t believe me and got mad at me for wasting her time. Oh I’ll never forget that one.
September is Next
I hate to be a downer, but Autumn (or “Fall” as the kids like to say) is only two months away. And then comes winter, but the least said about that the better. I’m already starting to think of the fun indoor activities that nobody comes to in the summer because all you bastards are too busy playing volleyball or god knows what else. Movie nights (by vote? by theme? by decade) or Cartoon nights (by vote? by etc etc), more gaming nights, and new RPG campaigns to be had. Slackademics Gone Wild! It’s an exciting time. And don’t forget that Zombie Walk or Beach Party or something is coming up this month. And H.P. Lovecraft’s Birthday Party. In the meantime, I want to play badminton with you…bastards.
It's August
I cant recall any dreams Ive had for months, that is until I reserved a rental car for the family reunion in Penticton this coming weekend. Since then Ive had anxious dreams every night. No sir, I dont like it. Last night I watched the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and it was like looking through a window to the Thickets. Except that nobody took off from the band for 6 months and went into rehab, and we didnt sue Napster, and we never had millions of dollars. Actually it wasnt at all like looking through a window at the Thickets, except that we too have had bass player problems. But what band hasnt? Primus maybe. If we did have millions of dollars, I can think of a lot better ways to use it than buying hot rods and litigation. How about improving yourself or using it to stretch yourself creatively? Oh nevermind, Lars. I also watched the 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man on TCM and had a lot of jolly yucks. A lot of it was comprised of the actors standing in front of stock footage from a previous Africa shoot. The authenticity of the African culture was juxtaposed by the transparency of the effects. As an amateur zoologist and TV disciple of Sir David Attenborough much of the wildlife references were laughable, but I guess thats to be expected from turn of the century pulp fiction. Tonight is Slackademics Campology 101 and Im pretty jazzed.
I Put the Love in Lovecraft
With my roleplaying buddies I planned
A Lovecraftian rock ‘n’ roll band
When the media tires me
And asks what inspires me
I just show them my pineal gland